Pedro Alejandro Verdin — CalArts Post Grad Show Y25

Pedro Alejandro Verdin x Sophia Le Fraga

(Art MFA 25)
IG: @iwannabeadored

Painting We Made for Alice (But if I’m dark I’m strong / as my own darkness / my strength the universe / whose blackness is air / only starry / lace / But if I’m alive I’m strong / as life), 2025

Pedro Alejandro Verdin and Sophia Le Fraga’s collaborative painting AS LIFE was created the week Alice Notley passed, using language from Notley’s poem 30th Birthday to honor the poet’s engagement with language’s circulation. The painting creates a space where two artists’ practices converge in simultaneous celebration and mourning. Collaboration stages mutual attention to a shared literary influence who mattered to both. Verdin works with images, materials, and sounds that drift between the personal and the collective, creating paintings that emerge slowly, layered with gestures both intentional and incidental. Le Fraga’s practice explores how language travels through time and space, how it leaves traces and accumulates in bodies and objects. Poems are also photographs made of words and photographs are conceived of as poems without them.

PROXY CHIMERA ORACLE

CalArts 2025